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Show Wide Range of Problems Confront Research Workers With many problems in forestry yet unsolved, research in the Forest service, United States Department of Agriculture, is entering on a new era of intensified attack. The legislature authorizations of the McSweeney McNary law, enacted last spring, have created a basis for a less piecemeal piece-meal method of financing and conducting con-ducting the work, says the Forest Service, and consequently for a more orderly, comprehensive, and sustained sustain-ed attack upon the great number of unsolved problems that now hold back the development of sound policy and ! practice. The Forest Service now has eleven i forest experimental stations in op-! eration, located in major forest re- j I gions of the country. These are all ! engaged in studies of numerous re- j gional problems which make up the i fundamental problem of the best use ! of all the forest lands in the United ! States. Two important general ob- J jects in the research program are j j (1) a series of studies to determine j j growth capacity or what wood return 'can be expected from, a given piece1 iof forest land; and (2) a series to j determine the silvicultural practices 1 necessary to keep forest lands everywhere every-where fully productive. Of the growth capacity studies, several are nearing completion and yield tables are now available to tim-1 berland owners' and foresters for the ! four southern pines, spruce in the Northeast; Douglas fir in the Pacific j Northwest; western pine in the north-j ! ern Rocky Mountains; yellow poplar i in the Appalachian region and the i southern white cedar of the eastern ; coast. The study, when completed, ' will" be a monumental piece of work involving the making of more than 200 volume tables. ! A number of studies to determine desirable silvicultural practices have likevv'se been completed, and reports are already available for the California Calif-ornia pine rcg'on, the Douglas fir region re-gion of the Pacific Northwest, the ; ( Central harwood reg:on, the Western white pine and larch-fir forests of the Rock Mountains, and the Lake ' States region. Each study aTms to determine the measures which V.iv.-bcrland V.iv.-bcrland owners should adopt to grow and protect valuable timber crop?. Other 'nv?st!rat:ons now und.T way are the Southern Pir.e region, the Central Rocky Mountains, the North- ( west, and for western yellow pine, both north and south. Some other purely regional problems prob-lems now under investigation are the proper management of mixed spruce and hardwood forests in the Northeast, North-east, and of hardwoods in the Appalachian Appa-lachian region; the rehabilitation of the millions of acres of unproductive or only partially productive cut-over land in the Lake States and the. relation re-lation of drainage to swamp forest growth; in the Southern Pine region, the development of methods of turpentining tur-pentining that will best fit the requirements re-quirements of forest management; in the Intermountain region, the development devel-opment of cutting methods to insure reproduction in the shortest possible time; and in California, very difficult and important problems of fire control con-trol and the relationship between forest cover and water supplies including in-cluding the proper management of southern California chaparral forests to prevent erosion and rapid run-off. j Among the many other problems awaiting solution are: The damage done by forest fires to stands of various var-ious ages; the best methods of thinning thin-ning young stands to increase their productivity; the distance to which wind carries the seed of various con- j ifers; the damage to woodlots through over-grazing; and methods of cutting in various forests types to insure rapid restocking of the best species. There are also a vast number of important problems in improvement in quality and in the more effective utilization of forest products, and in the field of forest economics such as the taxation of forest lands which the Forest Service and cooperating cooper-ating agencies have under investigation. investi-gation. In carrying out their programs the forest experiment stations are cooperating co-operating closely with the State Foresters For-esters and forestry organizations in even." region. The State Forester of California is participating in a study of cros!on and stream flow, and in in other investigations, and the State Forester of Louisiana in a survey of southern hardwood bottom lands. In Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and clswhere, the State Foresters are ns-s'stir.g ns-s'stir.g in the collection of field data, and in Michigan and Wisconsin the strife departments are cooperating in fire and growth studies. Many forest schools also work in close cooperation coopera-tion with the forest experiment stations. sta-tions. i |
